And yet you ignore the fundamental point: the Wizard is the class with no actual mechanics beyond "cast more spells," "turn some basic spells into cantrips," and "cast some slightly powerful spells an extra time each day." The Wizard is the class where its subclasses do almost nothing, much of it perfectly reduplicated, and which could extremely easily be compressed into a single level plus (optionally) a 1st-level feat. The Wizard is the class that doesn't lift one finger mechanically to do anything of the actual fluff and flavor, no research, no spell development, no publication, no interaction with the academic community. Hell, the Scribes subclass is literally the only one that even has mechanics that actually care about the spell book beyond its purely utilitarian function as a Pokemon card binder learned spell collection.
Everything the Wizard is, including all its special unique spells not shared with Sorcerer, could be reduced to a single Sorcerer subclass and most people would barely notice.
Why is it then the Sorcerer that must go, if it is nearly trivial to condense the Wizard into the Sorcerer with only minor loss, but practically impossible to condense the Sorcerer into the Wizard without gutting most of the class and its subclasses?